Oil Targets in Spotlight as Iran War Enters Second Week – As it Happened

Trump says he thinks Russia may be helping Iran ‘a little bit’

Earlier, Donald Trump said he believes that Russia might be helping Iran “a little bit”, before pointing to US support for Ukraine as possible justification.

In an interview on Fox News Radio on Friday morning, the US president was pressed on whether he believes Vladimir Putin is supporting Iran following US-Israeli strikes on the country. He said:

I think he might be helping him a little bit, yeah, I guess. And he probably thinks we’re helping Ukraine, right? Yeah, we’re helping [Ukraine] also. And so, [Putin] says that, and China would say the same thing. You know, it’s like, hey, they do it and we do it. In all fairness, they do it and we do it.

On Thursday, the UK defence secretary, John Healey, said that Putin’s “hidden hand” lies behind Iran’s military methods.

He was speaking after British officers at the UK’s military headquarters in London told him that drone pilots from Iran and Iranian proxies were increasingly adopting tactics “from the Russians”.

Iran has already fired more than 2,000 Shahed drones – long-range weapons heavily used by Russia against Ukraine – across the Middle East in response to the US-Israeli attack launched on 28 February.

Last week, the Washington Post and others reported that Moscow was providing Tehran with intelligence on US military assets in the region.

Putin denied Russian involvement in a phone call with Trump, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said on Tuesday.

Source: The Guardian